May 05, 2016

Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of gravitational
waves in 1916.Here’s his original hand-written logicwhich the genius later
converted into a typed manuscript.

This
remarkably preserved piece of history is kept at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem’s Albert Einstein Archives, which contains about 55,000 items of
Einstein’s work.

In
fact, Albert Einstein was one of the university’s first Board of Governors — an
influential member who helps run a university — and left all of his personal
papers, as well as the copyright to them, to the university in his
Will.

Here, the curator for Einstein’s archives, Roni Grosz, points to
one of the critical equations from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity,
which predicts that two celestial bodies in orbit will generate invisible
ripples in spacetime that experts call gravitational waves.

On
Feb. 11, 2016 an international collaboration of scientists working with the
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced that 100
years after Einstein’s prediction, they had successfully detected a gravitational wave for the first
time.That
same day, curator Grosz dug up Einstein’s original manuscripts for gravitational
waves, and posed for the camera in celebration of the momentous
achievement.

Some
of the most powerful events in the universe, like two colliding black holes or a
supernova explosion, generate powerful gravitational waves. These events are
also some of the most mysterious because astrophysicists don’t understand why
black holes collide or what triggers a supernova. Gravitational waves could help
solve some of these mysteries.